Workplace violence in Health Care Settings

Workplace violence is a major health and safety problem to service workers, especially health care workers.  Management forces cite the incidence of injury from violence, to justify concentrating on co-worker assaults, and advancing profiling. The paper abstracted below shows that client violence is more important to social service and health care workers.

The main finding from this survey of Minnesota nurses was that workplace violence victims were far more likely than non victims to be in nursing homes, geriatric care and long term care environments.

BrooklynDodger looked at the full text long enough to be confident that “zero tolerance policy” – the lead preventive measure, was not defined.  Maybe it’s a term of art in the health care community.  

In order to decipher these results, we’d need to see the prevention measures stratified by work environment.

Extract from full text:

“Nurses were asked about eight different policy components: ‘‘Prior to (specific month), did your facility/institution/agency have a written policy on violence that addressed any of the following: (a) ‘zero tolerance’ for violence, that is, violence was not tolerated at any level; (b) types of violent behaviours (physical assault, threat, sexual harassment, or verbal abuse) that were prohibited; (c) consequences for those who used violence at work; (d) how to report if someone sexually harassed, threatened, or verbally abused you; (e) how to report if someone physically assaulted you; (f) assurance that reporting of violent incidents would be kept confidential; (g) requirements for violence prevention training of staff members; and (h) requirements for flagging of charts or other signals to staff members regarding patients/clients with repeated violent behaviour?’’ Response options included yes, no, and unsure. They were then asked the degree to which policy components were enforced.”

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Relation between policies and work related assault: Minnesota Nurses’ Study

N M Nachreiner, S G Gerberich, P M McGovern, T R Church, H E Hansen, M S Geisser, A D Ryan
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Occup Environ Med 2005;62:675–681

…From Phase 1 of the Minnesota Nurses’ Study, a population based survey of 6300 Minnesota nurses (response 79%), 13.2% reported experiencing work related physical assault in the past year. In Phase 2, a case-control study, 1900 nurses (response 75%) were questioned about exposures relevant to violence, including eight work related violence prevention policy items. … Results of multiple regression analyses, controlling for appropriate factors, indicated that the odds of physical assault decreased for having a zero tolerance policy … and having policies regarding types of prohibited violent behaviours … Analyses adjusted for non-response and non-selection resulted in wider confidence intervals, but no substantial change in effect estimates….